11 ms·

Reddit bans ‘SFW’ deepfake community

94 points by Hard_Space 4y ago

jjbinx007 4y ago
The sub for banned because users were asking for stuff. They didn't ban the users, they banned the subreddit. If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules.
- dangrossman 4y ago
  Only if that subreddit also allows such requests to stay up. Reddit closes subreddits for lack of active moderation all the time.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    That's not what the GP is getting at. When Reddit management wants to ban a subreddit, they cite all sorts of transgressions and lapses in moderation policy that can easily and routinely be seen on other subreddits - often large ones. I see all sorts of thinly veiled calls for violence on political subreddits, and even on seemingly mundane ones like r/Texas whenever Ted Cruz comes up. Apparently, calls to get out the guillotine are highly contextual.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      To be fair, the stuff going across r/conservative is quite a bit worse than r/politics. Which I expected, of course, because r/politics is a generic discussion subreddit and not intentionally one-sided. But Reddit leaves both alone.
      - BitwiseFool 4y ago
        >" To be fair, the stuff going across r/conservative is quite a bit worse than r/politics. Which I expected, of course, because r/politics is a generic discussion subreddit and not intentionally one-sided. But Reddit leaves both alone. " In my experience r/politics is the most biased and lopsided major subreddit on the entire platform. People criticize r/conservative but I genuinely do not see the same level of wanton hyperbole, demonization of the other side, and calls for revolution in r/conservative that I routinely see in the comments of major posts from r/politics.
        mattnewton 4y ago
        Eh, I think moderating the larger political sub is a much harder job. idk how much time you have spent on r/conservative but the comments can get pretty aggressive too, I just imagine there are orders of magnitude less of them, so the mods generally find and remove the ones that call for trans people to be forcibly hospitalized or harmed for example, or that such and such a politician should be shot. You can still find comments saying parents who have gay friends to have their children removed from their custody or whatever though; they have to be slightly more oblique than I think what stays up much longer on r/politics.
        mandmandam 4y ago
        Try looking at r/conservative right now. It's fucking batty mate.
        stjohnswarts 4y ago
        I check occasionally, most of the posts there are right wing nuts. Like 100% without merit will get thousands of upvotes and lots of comment from what are obviously russian/chinese/whoever bots.
      - jimbob45 4y ago
        I sense that your comment is going to attract a lot of attention. I want to point out that r/conservative is worse than r/politics in a way that both conservatives and liberals would agree is bad. Perhaps 80% of r/conservative threads can only be commented on by flaired users. Certainly all the threads one would actually want to contribute to at any rate. How do you get a flair? You have to post conservative-sounding things elsewhere or in the non-flair-only threads. Only once you've established that you're not going to deviate from the groupthink will you be allowed to participate in the community. Conversely, r/politics is a free-for-all. Granted, there is clear downvote brigading on alternative opinions but they do not get taken down ever. HN is going to read your "intentionally one-sided" quip and not understand how correct you truly are.
        qqtt 4y ago
        > Granted, there is clear downvote brigading on alternative opinions but they do not get taken down ever. So /r/politics is much better because instead of taking down "alternative opinions" they just downvote it? I am not convinced. Effectively downvoting alternative opinions not only effectively makes them completely hidden from view for most users (under a "this comment has too many downvotes" barrier), but the users who do stumble upon those massively downvoted "alternative opinion" comments will get a nice dopamine rush from seeing their own opinions further re-enforced because the downvotes must mean this opinion is wrong. Both are insidious and both behaviors massively contribute to group think bubbles. I don't think the pattern of behavior of one is massively better and more healthy than the other.
        jimbob45 4y ago
        'Sort by Controversial' solves the sort of problem you're describing. I know a lot of users who sort it that way by default now.
        rootusrootus 4y ago
        > So /r/politics is much better because instead of taking down "alternative opinions" they just downvote it? I am not convinced. Better than moderators doing it. Post something that deviates from what the moderators of r/conservative consider acceptable conservatism and they just ban you. If the community legitimately downvotes you, then at least you're facing garden variety groupthink instead of "my way or the highway" of a couple mods enforcing what is acceptable discussion. This is a pattern. Trump, at his coyly named "Truth Social" bans more people than Twitter ever did. And not for violent threats, either, but for simply disagreeing with his narrative.
      - mandmandam 4y ago
        Since many might not know: You can go to r/conservative any day of the week, and see the most batshit insane mind melting garbage you could possibly ask for. Eg, right now the top posts are: 1. Cheering the liberal tears that must surely ensue, as 5th graders are taught how to shoot guns in class. 2. Fabricated Biden attack. Just, invented, like as if it was a funny thing to do, or as if there isn't real stuff to criticise him on. 3, 4. Pictures of tweets from Republicans, both blaming Biden/Dems for systemic issues (problems caused and maintained by both sides). 5. Outrage that Sunday morning shows aren't talking about the man on serious meds, who called Emergency Services saying he was going to kill Kavanaugh (for trying to loosen gun control regulations). ... Fucking. Crazy. That's not politics, it's not discussion; it's mental assault on morons. And you are not allowed to post or comment there without affirming your conservatism.
  - pvarangot 4y ago
    They are constantly raising the bar on what "lack of active moderation" means. Also as the site gets bigger moderating even a small niche subreddit can become a part time job and Reddit does pay moderators of some subs, so it's being used to editorialize more now than ever.
    - duxup 4y ago
      > They are constantly raising the bar on what "lack of active moderation" means. If they are I haven’t seen it. Plenty of subs out there with zero moderation… sadly.
      - FridgeSeal 4y ago
        Reddit historically only cares about a subs moderation when it generates enough negative attention to become a problem for Reddit (the company, as opposed to Reddit the “community”). They’ve typically been quite happy to let quite toxic and otherwise rule breaking subreddits to exist so long as they don’t cause (too many) problems.
      - commandlinefan 4y ago
        They're constantly raising the bar on what "lack of active moderation" means as it pertains to certain specific subreddits very selectively.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  > If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules. No, because the rules specifically mention soliciting. As far as I can tell, the only other time this is mentioned is for "soliciting or facilitating illegal or prohibited transactions".
- sprayk 4y ago
  ah, the heckler's veto. I had only heard of that happening on college campuses recently. Never expected it to happen on someplace as big and diverse as Reddit
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  > If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules. Some subs do get brigaded by users intentionally posting content that violates reddit TOS. The same happens on Discord. Some are trolls, others are intentionally malicious so they can report things. If you have an inactive mod team in either community, yeah your sub will go poof.
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    > brigaded by users Or Reddit employees.
    - giancarlostoro 4y ago
      Do you have evidence of this?
- duxup 4y ago
  I’ve seen folks try that. Didn’t work. Another “politically oriented sub” had users who got pissed that they were banned for spamming a sub that I frequented. They made new accounts (they did that a lot…) and posted a couple normal posts in our sub and then again spammed but this time pretending to be organizing a brigade vs … their sub. Admins didn’t act when they complained because it was all pretty obvious and we moderated the brigade posts. In my experience it’s not just “hey there are a few posts” that triggers these kinds of actions.
  - wronglyprepaid 4y ago
    > I’ve seen folks try that. Okay, but this goes back to the condition: > If they enforced the rules consistently Which reddit does not - and you are right: > it’s not just “hey there are a few posts” that triggers these kinds of actions. There is an agenda, and then motivated reasoning to find justification for the agenda.
    - duxup 4y ago
      What I described wasn’t an “agenda” it was just recognizing that the local moderators were acting and the content wasn’t actually from the local users. That’s just common sense.
- treesrule 4y ago
  The magic the gathering subreddit has to moderate out the word "proxy" or risk getting banned. seems plausable like there are just a lot of speicfic rules you gotta follow to be a subreddit
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Why is that? Was there an announcement?
    - treesrule 4y ago
      I can track down the actualy post if you want I don't recall there being a specific announcment, but the logic goes something like this most people who use proxy are referring to fake magic cards printed to look like real ones and therefore talking about proxies how to make copies etc will lead to people cheating or stealing. For what its worth i used the term proxy for a decade almost exclusively to mean a cheap paper copy of a magic card (or even just writing the word on a sheet of paper and sticking it in a sleeve over a land) and I find this restriction wrong-headed.
- neya 4y ago
  By that logic, I have seen hardcore misandry on many of the feminist forums. Many even talk about killing their partners or harming their body parts routinely. Even moderators respond positively to those comments sometimes. But hey, it doesn’t fit their narrative and there would be a shitstorm if they banned such forums. “Reddit bans popular feminist forum, paving a new way for misogyny” My point is they only ban the ones that don’t fit their narrative or their political views and they know they can get away with.
  - dubswithus 4y ago
    I thought /r/FemaleDatingStrategy was banned. It's still up though.
    - Invictus0 4y ago
      What's wrong with it?
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        It could basically be renamed "/r/HowToGoldDig" and still be accurate
        Invictus0 4y ago
        And what's wrong with that? And why is that against the rules?
      - dubswithus 4y ago
        The women there see men as porn addicted, revolting, abusive pigs. I think I'm understating it a bit. But you get the gist. It's the female incel.
    - namlem 4y ago
      It was quarantined but not banned.
  - themitigating 4y ago
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules Pretty sure that's how every subreddit that's ever been banned got banned.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- syrrim 4y ago
  Stated reason != real reason. A common method reddit uses is to first ban all the mods, not accept any request for other users to take over the sub, then ban it for being unmoderated. Attempts to recreate the community will result in another ban, since you are recreating a banned community. If they want a sub gone, they will generate a reason to remove it.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    I don't really see why they need a reason, I thought they could just delete the sub?
    - natpalmer1776 4y ago
      Community trust and goodwill is the primary reason to not go around deleting subs without precedent established via TOS or past actions.
  - winternett 4y ago
    Exactly this... I created a music sub 3 years ago on Reddit, ran it for about a year and a half when I made one cross post to a relevant subreddit and got permanently banned with no explanation and no due process. Reddit still has the sub up with all of my (custom) content and comments. My sub was orphaned right when it was picking up steam. I decided to simply build out my own site for posts after that point, IG, TikTok, FaceBook etc, are all operating in the same monopolistic ways with content now. Honestly, I think reddit was started as a crowd sourcing test that was really meant to build the platform's notoriety, and once it grew in dominance, they simply ditched the independent creators in order to run their own profit and IPO up. I also think this is why reddit forces most people away from using links to external sites like YouTube, because they want all the traffic on their own site. By uploading video and images to reddit's CDN, you have no idea of the amount of times items are being used. Tons of content is literally ripped off YouTube and TikTok and then re-hosted on Reddit's CDN and that leads to lower views for the original creators of the content. It's really corporate piracy that preys upon small creators. One day there may be a class action lawsuit, but I doubt it will result in anything fair for the lost time and damage done to content creators.
- drewrv 4y ago
  I don't know of any social media site that has been able to "consistently" enforce moderation at scale. When you have millions of humans they will find every edge case and workaround to any specific legalese you come up with. Courts struggle with it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhWCk2f2alI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhWCk2f2alI Smaller sites like HN do better compared to twitter or reddit, because it's easier. But ultimately it all depends on what kind of communities the company wants to nurture. While it would be nice if social media companies actually said the truth about moderation rather than pretending there's some content neutral principals they're applying, I also think a lot of people would be better off if they accept that social media is what it is, and move on if they don't like it.
  - winternett 4y ago
    They all can't moderate because they don't want to sacrifice profit... That's the explanation. They are also too large, but moderation and proper community support were once requirements for communities and now it's gone... It's a really selfish and lazy way of just collecting profit, and it also disrupts the ability of vital information, honest people, and key commercial entities to function on the platform. This behavior has been occurring on Reddit for years, Social media companies also work hard to suppress dissent and complaints from public view... It's really creating the ideal that hostile, anti-competitive, and abusive behavior towards user bases is the new norm... Especially when they are paying most users to contribute, it creates a grim future for social media overall. It's just far better to create a web site and pour that effort and time into it instead of working in an abusive and exclusionary community like that.
- yucky 4y ago
  >If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules. They just change the rules as needed. Look at /r/blackpeopletwitter, they have a rule that you can only post in "country club threads" if you have sent a picture of your skin color in to the mods to verify you aren't white, since they don't want white people posting in there. When people pointed out the obvious hypocrisy of Reddit endorsing racial discrimination by one of its largest subs, they just re-wrote the rules to make it kosher. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/us/reddit-race-black-people-twitter.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/us/reddit-race-black-peop...
badRNG 4y ago
Important note: the largest "SFW" Deepfake community, r/SFWdeepfakes, was not banned, rather a smaller competing subreddit which doesn't have a recent archive on the popular archive sites.
- rvschuilenburg 4y ago
  This is really interesting. I saw this post on hckrnews and instantly had a flashback to that moment my account was banned from reddit. I had actually created the SFWdeepfakes subreddit, because i thought those edits of Nicolas Cage on everything were absolutely hilarious. Guess what? Suspended for "posting involuntary pornography". Tried to get my account back, but reddit was "experiencing higher than usual support volume" and never got back to me. Oh well.
polote 4y ago
One day, a nude photo will be considered not much different than a face photo and that day a lot of things in the world will be much easier
- mdanger007 4y ago
  I'm imagining a day when telephone scammers call up a loved one with AI of your voice.
  - echelon 4y ago
    People ask "was that photoshopped?" all the time. Kids will be video calling each other as SpongeBob and Richard Nixon soon. polote is right. In a decade, anyone will be able to make a nude of anyone else with their phone with just one photo. Or any other funny or stupid video or image. The tech is real and is coming fast. We can either legislate it or stop worrying and get used to it. I prefer the latter approach. This is going to be the biggest artistic renaissance of all time. Everyone has something to say, but most lack the years of practiced skill to say it. Not anymore.
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      What do we do when someone creates a deep fake of Putin saying he will nuke Ukraine if they do not surrender within 3 days?
      - mtizim 4y ago
        You could easily fake a document and post it on twitter. You could fake a photo of putin pointing a gun at ukrainian children easily. What's so different with a video?
        sjkoelle 4y ago
        interesting discussion from the OG https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/06/a-few-thoughts-about-deep-fakes/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/06/a-few-thoughts-a...
phkahler 4y ago
I thought nuclear weapons were an outlier, but it seems like humanity is going to have to figure out a more general way to handle technology that exists but is more harmful than not.
- sneak 4y ago
  What evidence is there that deepfakes are harmful and not just distasteful? Generating offense and disgust is not necessary inherently harmful.
  - kevinwang 4y ago
    More of a post-truth world
    - sjkoelle 4y ago
      remember the Maine!
  - ocharles 4y ago
    Please tell me that you don't think deepfakes are only ever going to be distasteful. Once this becomes more commonplace, you're going to see it being applied to more personal connections - e.g., deepfaking pornography about friends. While already dark, it doesn't take long for this be essentially inventing blackmail material. Once the quality is high enough, there's a ton of potential for deepfakes to be extremely damaging for ones life. If you don't have the social status to prove to a community that it's a fake, ones can be significantly impacted.
    - tomjen3 4y ago
      People will believe the fakes, or not, based on what they want to believe. Once the quality is good enough you can argue that any is true and the other side can say deep fake.
    - throw457 4y ago
      http://deepnude.cc http://deepnude.cc we are already there.
honkler 4y ago
think about the children!
martythemaniak 4y ago
Everybody interested in this topic should read Yishan's (reddit CEO early 2010s) thread on the story around /r/Jailbait and content moderation. edit: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1519239024379973632.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1519239024379973632.html
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  Do you have a link to his thread?
  - martythemaniak 4y ago
    Can't believe I made a comment to post a url, and forgot to post the url :0 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1519239024379973632.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1519239024379973632.html
kmeisthax 4y ago
>Even though many such posts skirt perilously close to copyright-driven bans, the continuing survival of ‘IP-appropriated’ non-porn deepfake video posts by major YouTube deepfakers such as Ctrl-Shift-Face suggest a broad studio and rights-holder tolerance towards such activity, at least for the time being. I would not be surprised if this isn't so much tolerance as much as it is ignorance. Copyright enforcement is hilariously expensive, and the only reason why any litigation even happens is that larger outfits are also hilariously petty. The mantra of copyright maximalism is that if anyone is even remotely touching "your work", you storm in and demand whatever money you can purely for the sake of keeping people off your "property". Trust me, once they run out of nominally-SFW-but-actually-NSFW communities to ban, you'll see movie studios cotton onto what they consider to be theft[0] and start prosecuting something that doesn't really harm them in any way. [0] Assume, for the sake of this discussion, that if we as a people decide someone gets a government monopoly on something, then depriving them of their monopoly is stealing from them. Yes, I hate this logic too.
haunter 4y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/SFWdeepfakes/comments/v0d4i8/elon_musk_the_elders_opinion_on_people_falling/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SFWdeepfakes/comments/v0d4i8/elon_m...
michaelt 4y ago
If you'd asked me a few years ago, I'd have said deepfakes aren't a problem - that lack of media literacy is the problem. We've had photoshop and staged photos and impersonators and satirical news for years, after all. And although a tiny fraction of the population falls for hoaxes like bigfoot and astrology and homeopathy, 99% of people manage to sift through this stuff. What I learned from the pandemic, though, is that people are much worse at telling fact from fiction than I expected. It's given me a greater understanding of the people who are very worried about deepfakes - if you think it's more like 10%-30% of the population that are very easily fooled, new technology for fakery is an ominous thing to see.
- wonderbore 4y ago
  Those are rookie numbers. I think the % of people who can be easily fooled is almost 100%. There are fewer and fewer people who live their lives doubting what they see unless they’re already attached to the opposite of that idea. Most people are not trained to detect deep fakes and certainly most of us here still would fall for a deepfake unless we’re specifically looking for it.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    The key here is to pay less attention to the “evidence” and instead ask where it come from. If there isn’t a clear story by trustworthy people about how it came to be, you will need to at least suspect it’s fake. Unfortunately that means that random Internet commenters aren’t going to be trusted.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Holywood level of production has been able to do deep fakes for like a 100 years. Fake videos is nothing new. The main difference is that there might be cheap tailored fakes for noname people like me for small scams.
    - wonderbore 4y ago
      You’re probably replying to the wrong person. I’m just saying that everyone can fall for fake stuff.
kanzure 4y ago
OK, and where did they go?

94 points by Hard_Space 4y ago

The sub for banned because users were asking for stuff. They didn't ban the users, they banned the subreddit. If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules.

dangrossman 4y ago
Only if that subreddit also allows such requests to stay up. Reddit closes subreddits for lack of active moderation all the time.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  That's not what the GP is getting at. When Reddit management wants to ban a subreddit, they cite all sorts of transgressions and lapses in moderation policy that can easily and routinely be seen on other subreddits - often large ones. I see all sorts of thinly veiled calls for violence on political subreddits, and even on seemingly mundane ones like r/Texas whenever Ted Cruz comes up. Apparently, calls to get out the guillotine are highly contextual.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    To be fair, the stuff going across r/conservative is quite a bit worse than r/politics. Which I expected, of course, because r/politics is a generic discussion subreddit and not intentionally one-sided. But Reddit leaves both alone.
    - BitwiseFool 4y ago
      >" To be fair, the stuff going across r/conservative is quite a bit worse than r/politics. Which I expected, of course, because r/politics is a generic discussion subreddit and not intentionally one-sided. But Reddit leaves both alone. " In my experience r/politics is the most biased and lopsided major subreddit on the entire platform. People criticize r/conservative but I genuinely do not see the same level of wanton hyperbole, demonization of the other side, and calls for revolution in r/conservative that I routinely see in the comments of major posts from r/politics.
      - mattnewton 4y ago
        Eh, I think moderating the larger political sub is a much harder job. idk how much time you have spent on r/conservative but the comments can get pretty aggressive too, I just imagine there are orders of magnitude less of them, so the mods generally find and remove the ones that call for trans people to be forcibly hospitalized or harmed for example, or that such and such a politician should be shot. You can still find comments saying parents who have gay friends to have their children removed from their custody or whatever though; they have to be slightly more oblique than I think what stays up much longer on r/politics.
      - mandmandam 4y ago
        Try looking at r/conservative right now. It's fucking batty mate.
        stjohnswarts 4y ago
        I check occasionally, most of the posts there are right wing nuts. Like 100% without merit will get thousands of upvotes and lots of comment from what are obviously russian/chinese/whoever bots.
    - jimbob45 4y ago
      I sense that your comment is going to attract a lot of attention. I want to point out that r/conservative is worse than r/politics in a way that both conservatives and liberals would agree is bad. Perhaps 80% of r/conservative threads can only be commented on by flaired users. Certainly all the threads one would actually want to contribute to at any rate. How do you get a flair? You have to post conservative-sounding things elsewhere or in the non-flair-only threads. Only once you've established that you're not going to deviate from the groupthink will you be allowed to participate in the community. Conversely, r/politics is a free-for-all. Granted, there is clear downvote brigading on alternative opinions but they do not get taken down ever. HN is going to read your "intentionally one-sided" quip and not understand how correct you truly are.
      - qqtt 4y ago
        > Granted, there is clear downvote brigading on alternative opinions but they do not get taken down ever. So /r/politics is much better because instead of taking down "alternative opinions" they just downvote it? I am not convinced. Effectively downvoting alternative opinions not only effectively makes them completely hidden from view for most users (under a "this comment has too many downvotes" barrier), but the users who do stumble upon those massively downvoted "alternative opinion" comments will get a nice dopamine rush from seeing their own opinions further re-enforced because the downvotes must mean this opinion is wrong. Both are insidious and both behaviors massively contribute to group think bubbles. I don't think the pattern of behavior of one is massively better and more healthy than the other.
        jimbob45 4y ago
        'Sort by Controversial' solves the sort of problem you're describing. I know a lot of users who sort it that way by default now.
        rootusrootus 4y ago
        > So /r/politics is much better because instead of taking down "alternative opinions" they just downvote it? I am not convinced. Better than moderators doing it. Post something that deviates from what the moderators of r/conservative consider acceptable conservatism and they just ban you. If the community legitimately downvotes you, then at least you're facing garden variety groupthink instead of "my way or the highway" of a couple mods enforcing what is acceptable discussion. This is a pattern. Trump, at his coyly named "Truth Social" bans more people than Twitter ever did. And not for violent threats, either, but for simply disagreeing with his narrative.
    - mandmandam 4y ago
      Since many might not know: You can go to r/conservative any day of the week, and see the most batshit insane mind melting garbage you could possibly ask for. Eg, right now the top posts are: 1. Cheering the liberal tears that must surely ensue, as 5th graders are taught how to shoot guns in class. 2. Fabricated Biden attack. Just, invented, like as if it was a funny thing to do, or as if there isn't real stuff to criticise him on. 3, 4. Pictures of tweets from Republicans, both blaming Biden/Dems for systemic issues (problems caused and maintained by both sides). 5. Outrage that Sunday morning shows aren't talking about the man on serious meds, who called Emergency Services saying he was going to kill Kavanaugh (for trying to loosen gun control regulations). ... Fucking. Crazy. That's not politics, it's not discussion; it's mental assault on morons. And you are not allowed to post or comment there without affirming your conservatism.
- pvarangot 4y ago
  They are constantly raising the bar on what "lack of active moderation" means. Also as the site gets bigger moderating even a small niche subreddit can become a part time job and Reddit does pay moderators of some subs, so it's being used to editorialize more now than ever.
  - duxup 4y ago
    > They are constantly raising the bar on what "lack of active moderation" means. If they are I haven’t seen it. Plenty of subs out there with zero moderation… sadly.
    - FridgeSeal 4y ago
      Reddit historically only cares about a subs moderation when it generates enough negative attention to become a problem for Reddit (the company, as opposed to Reddit the “community”). They’ve typically been quite happy to let quite toxic and otherwise rule breaking subreddits to exist so long as they don’t cause (too many) problems.
    - commandlinefan 4y ago
      They're constantly raising the bar on what "lack of active moderation" means as it pertains to certain specific subreddits very selectively.
Semaphor 4y ago
> If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules. No, because the rules specifically mention soliciting. As far as I can tell, the only other time this is mentioned is for "soliciting or facilitating illegal or prohibited transactions".
sprayk 4y ago
ah, the heckler's veto. I had only heard of that happening on college campuses recently. Never expected it to happen on someplace as big and diverse as Reddit
giancarlostoro 4y ago
> If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules. Some subs do get brigaded by users intentionally posting content that violates reddit TOS. The same happens on Discord. Some are trolls, others are intentionally malicious so they can report things. If you have an inactive mod team in either community, yeah your sub will go poof.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > brigaded by users Or Reddit employees.
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    Do you have evidence of this?
duxup 4y ago
I’ve seen folks try that. Didn’t work. Another “politically oriented sub” had users who got pissed that they were banned for spamming a sub that I frequented. They made new accounts (they did that a lot…) and posted a couple normal posts in our sub and then again spammed but this time pretending to be organizing a brigade vs … their sub. Admins didn’t act when they complained because it was all pretty obvious and we moderated the brigade posts. In my experience it’s not just “hey there are a few posts” that triggers these kinds of actions.
- wronglyprepaid 4y ago
  > I’ve seen folks try that. Okay, but this goes back to the condition: > If they enforced the rules consistently Which reddit does not - and you are right: > it’s not just “hey there are a few posts” that triggers these kinds of actions. There is an agenda, and then motivated reasoning to find justification for the agenda.
  - duxup 4y ago
    What I described wasn’t an “agenda” it was just recognizing that the local moderators were acting and the content wasn’t actually from the local users. That’s just common sense.
treesrule 4y ago
The magic the gathering subreddit has to moderate out the word "proxy" or risk getting banned. seems plausable like there are just a lot of speicfic rules you gotta follow to be a subreddit
- pjc50 4y ago
  Why is that? Was there an announcement?
  - treesrule 4y ago
    I can track down the actualy post if you want I don't recall there being a specific announcment, but the logic goes something like this most people who use proxy are referring to fake magic cards printed to look like real ones and therefore talking about proxies how to make copies etc will lead to people cheating or stealing. For what its worth i used the term proxy for a decade almost exclusively to mean a cheap paper copy of a magic card (or even just writing the word on a sheet of paper and sticking it in a sleeve over a land) and I find this restriction wrong-headed.
neya 4y ago
By that logic, I have seen hardcore misandry on many of the feminist forums. Many even talk about killing their partners or harming their body parts routinely. Even moderators respond positively to those comments sometimes. But hey, it doesn’t fit their narrative and there would be a shitstorm if they banned such forums. “Reddit bans popular feminist forum, paving a new way for misogyny” My point is they only ban the ones that don’t fit their narrative or their political views and they know they can get away with.
- dubswithus 4y ago
  I thought /r/FemaleDatingStrategy was banned. It's still up though.
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    What's wrong with it?
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      It could basically be renamed "/r/HowToGoldDig" and still be accurate
      - Invictus0 4y ago
        And what's wrong with that? And why is that against the rules?
    - dubswithus 4y ago
      The women there see men as porn addicted, revolting, abusive pigs. I think I'm understating it a bit. But you get the gist. It's the female incel.
  - namlem 4y ago
    It was quarantined but not banned.
- themitigating 4y ago
commandlinefan 4y ago
> I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules Pretty sure that's how every subreddit that's ever been banned got banned.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
syrrim 4y ago
Stated reason != real reason. A common method reddit uses is to first ban all the mods, not accept any request for other users to take over the sub, then ban it for being unmoderated. Attempts to recreate the community will result in another ban, since you are recreating a banned community. If they want a sub gone, they will generate a reason to remove it.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  I don't really see why they need a reason, I thought they could just delete the sub?
  - natpalmer1776 4y ago
    Community trust and goodwill is the primary reason to not go around deleting subs without precedent established via TOS or past actions.
- winternett 4y ago
  Exactly this... I created a music sub 3 years ago on Reddit, ran it for about a year and a half when I made one cross post to a relevant subreddit and got permanently banned with no explanation and no due process. Reddit still has the sub up with all of my (custom) content and comments. My sub was orphaned right when it was picking up steam. I decided to simply build out my own site for posts after that point, IG, TikTok, FaceBook etc, are all operating in the same monopolistic ways with content now. Honestly, I think reddit was started as a crowd sourcing test that was really meant to build the platform's notoriety, and once it grew in dominance, they simply ditched the independent creators in order to run their own profit and IPO up. I also think this is why reddit forces most people away from using links to external sites like YouTube, because they want all the traffic on their own site. By uploading video and images to reddit's CDN, you have no idea of the amount of times items are being used. Tons of content is literally ripped off YouTube and TikTok and then re-hosted on Reddit's CDN and that leads to lower views for the original creators of the content. It's really corporate piracy that preys upon small creators. One day there may be a class action lawsuit, but I doubt it will result in anything fair for the lost time and damage done to content creators.
drewrv 4y ago
I don't know of any social media site that has been able to "consistently" enforce moderation at scale. When you have millions of humans they will find every edge case and workaround to any specific legalese you come up with. Courts struggle with it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhWCk2f2alI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhWCk2f2alI Smaller sites like HN do better compared to twitter or reddit, because it's easier. But ultimately it all depends on what kind of communities the company wants to nurture. While it would be nice if social media companies actually said the truth about moderation rather than pretending there's some content neutral principals they're applying, I also think a lot of people would be better off if they accept that social media is what it is, and move on if they don't like it.
- winternett 4y ago
  They all can't moderate because they don't want to sacrifice profit... That's the explanation. They are also too large, but moderation and proper community support were once requirements for communities and now it's gone... It's a really selfish and lazy way of just collecting profit, and it also disrupts the ability of vital information, honest people, and key commercial entities to function on the platform. This behavior has been occurring on Reddit for years, Social media companies also work hard to suppress dissent and complaints from public view... It's really creating the ideal that hostile, anti-competitive, and abusive behavior towards user bases is the new norm... Especially when they are paying most users to contribute, it creates a grim future for social media overall. It's just far better to create a web site and pour that effort and time into it instead of working in an abusive and exclusionary community like that.
yucky 4y ago
>If they enforced the rules consistently then by that logic I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules. They just change the rules as needed. Look at /r/blackpeopletwitter, they have a rule that you can only post in "country club threads" if you have sent a picture of your skin color in to the mods to verify you aren't white, since they don't want white people posting in there. When people pointed out the obvious hypocrisy of Reddit endorsing racial discrimination by one of its largest subs, they just re-wrote the rules to make it kosher. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/us/reddit-race-black-people-twitter.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/us/reddit-race-black-peop...

badRNG 4y ago

Important note: the largest "SFW" Deepfake community, r/SFWdeepfakes, was not banned, rather a smaller competing subreddit which doesn't have a recent archive on the popular archive sites.

rvschuilenburg 4y ago
This is really interesting. I saw this post on hckrnews and instantly had a flashback to that moment my account was banned from reddit. I had actually created the SFWdeepfakes subreddit, because i thought those edits of Nicolas Cage on everything were absolutely hilarious. Guess what? Suspended for "posting involuntary pornography". Tried to get my account back, but reddit was "experiencing higher than usual support volume" and never got back to me. Oh well.

polote 4y ago

One day, a nude photo will be considered not much different than a face photo and that day a lot of things in the world will be much easier

mdanger007 4y ago
I'm imagining a day when telephone scammers call up a loved one with AI of your voice.
- echelon 4y ago
  People ask "was that photoshopped?" all the time. Kids will be video calling each other as SpongeBob and Richard Nixon soon. polote is right. In a decade, anyone will be able to make a nude of anyone else with their phone with just one photo. Or any other funny or stupid video or image. The tech is real and is coming fast. We can either legislate it or stop worrying and get used to it. I prefer the latter approach. This is going to be the biggest artistic renaissance of all time. Everyone has something to say, but most lack the years of practiced skill to say it. Not anymore.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    What do we do when someone creates a deep fake of Putin saying he will nuke Ukraine if they do not surrender within 3 days?
    - mtizim 4y ago
      You could easily fake a document and post it on twitter. You could fake a photo of putin pointing a gun at ukrainian children easily. What's so different with a video?
      - sjkoelle 4y ago
        interesting discussion from the OG https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/06/a-few-thoughts-about-deep-fakes/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/06/a-few-thoughts-a...

phkahler 4y ago

I thought nuclear weapons were an outlier, but it seems like humanity is going to have to figure out a more general way to handle technology that exists but is more harmful than not.

sneak 4y ago
What evidence is there that deepfakes are harmful and not just distasteful? Generating offense and disgust is not necessary inherently harmful.
- kevinwang 4y ago
  More of a post-truth world
  - sjkoelle 4y ago
    remember the Maine!
- ocharles 4y ago
  Please tell me that you don't think deepfakes are only ever going to be distasteful. Once this becomes more commonplace, you're going to see it being applied to more personal connections - e.g., deepfaking pornography about friends. While already dark, it doesn't take long for this be essentially inventing blackmail material. Once the quality is high enough, there's a ton of potential for deepfakes to be extremely damaging for ones life. If you don't have the social status to prove to a community that it's a fake, ones can be significantly impacted.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    People will believe the fakes, or not, based on what they want to believe. Once the quality is good enough you can argue that any is true and the other side can say deep fake.
  - throw457 4y ago
    http://deepnude.cc http://deepnude.cc we are already there.

honkler 4y ago

think about the children!

martythemaniak 4y ago

Everybody interested in this topic should read Yishan's (reddit CEO early 2010s) thread on the story around /r/Jailbait and content moderation. edit: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1519239024379973632.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1519239024379973632.html

Dracophoenix 4y ago
Do you have a link to his thread?
- martythemaniak 4y ago
  Can't believe I made a comment to post a url, and forgot to post the url :0 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1519239024379973632.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1519239024379973632.html

kmeisthax 4y ago

>Even though many such posts skirt perilously close to copyright-driven bans, the continuing survival of ‘IP-appropriated’ non-porn deepfake video posts by major YouTube deepfakers such as Ctrl-Shift-Face suggest a broad studio and rights-holder tolerance towards such activity, at least for the time being. I would not be surprised if this isn't so much tolerance as much as it is ignorance. Copyright enforcement is hilariously expensive, and the only reason why any litigation even happens is that larger outfits are also hilariously petty. The mantra of copyright maximalism is that if anyone is even remotely touching "your work", you storm in and demand whatever money you can purely for the sake of keeping people off your "property". Trust me, once they run out of nominally-SFW-but-actually-NSFW communities to ban, you'll see movie studios cotton onto what they consider to be theft[0] and start prosecuting something that doesn't really harm them in any way. [0] Assume, for the sake of this discussion, that if we as a people decide someone gets a government monopoly on something, then depriving them of their monopoly is stealing from them. Yes, I hate this logic too.

haunter 4y ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/SFWdeepfakes/comments/v0d4i8/elon_musk_the_elders_opinion_on_people_falling/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SFWdeepfakes/comments/v0d4i8/elon_m...

michaelt 4y ago

If you'd asked me a few years ago, I'd have said deepfakes aren't a problem - that lack of media literacy is the problem. We've had photoshop and staged photos and impersonators and satirical news for years, after all. And although a tiny fraction of the population falls for hoaxes like bigfoot and astrology and homeopathy, 99% of people manage to sift through this stuff. What I learned from the pandemic, though, is that people are much worse at telling fact from fiction than I expected. It's given me a greater understanding of the people who are very worried about deepfakes - if you think it's more like 10%-30% of the population that are very easily fooled, new technology for fakery is an ominous thing to see.

wonderbore 4y ago
Those are rookie numbers. I think the % of people who can be easily fooled is almost 100%. There are fewer and fewer people who live their lives doubting what they see unless they’re already attached to the opposite of that idea. Most people are not trained to detect deep fakes and certainly most of us here still would fall for a deepfake unless we’re specifically looking for it.
- skybrian 4y ago
  The key here is to pay less attention to the “evidence” and instead ask where it come from. If there isn’t a clear story by trustworthy people about how it came to be, you will need to at least suspect it’s fake. Unfortunately that means that random Internet commenters aren’t going to be trusted.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Holywood level of production has been able to do deep fakes for like a 100 years. Fake videos is nothing new. The main difference is that there might be cheap tailored fakes for noname people like me for small scams.
  - wonderbore 4y ago
    You’re probably replying to the wrong person. I’m just saying that everyone can fall for fake stuff.

kanzure 4y ago

OK, and where did they go?